A “meme” is a piece of transmissible information that can replicate among people. The emergence of the Internet and wide adoption of online social networks not only brings about many Internet memes, but also provides an abundance of data on the spreading of memes and user behavior. Although numerous memes are created every day, only a few memes “go viral,” characterized by mass dissemination of an item on the Internet or other media. Such mass dissemination is called viral because of the similarity to how actual viruses are spread among people. With viral memes, one person shows the item in question to his or her contacts, who then show it to their contacts, and so on. The item can refer to emails, videos, pictures, or anything else that propagates among user groups based on its popularity.
Predicting whether a meme will go viral has attracted attention across various disciplines, including marketing, advertising, social media analysis, and many other disciplines. One conventional approach to predicting meme virality detects early popularity and predicts future popularity based on the early popularity. However, this approach does not provide an accurate prediction of meme virality.